San Diego Reader

There are three Laundromats in this neighborhood that I can recall off the top of my head. One on Oceanview Boulevard and Sampson, one on 31st and Oceanview, one on Main and 32nd. A little further out there’s a Laundromat in the Otto Square on 35th and National. There’s a place in the strip mall on Cesar Chavez and National. There’s Johnny and Ivy’s on 26th and Imperial. There’s the Wash House on 25th and Market. And there’s a brand new one on 30th and Market. I don’t know how it came about that I started going to a little Laundromat way up near University, next to an Animal Hospital. Then I found this Laundromat down in National City that’s pretty much where I’d been going for the last five years. The place was big, clean, everything worked, parking was good, there were lots of places to eat, and after I was done with the laundry I could go shopping at a few stores that I liked around that area.

The attendant there, a girl in her twenties, has a sister who comes in with her children, and the mother also comes in to work, sometimes with her daughter, sometimes by herself; they’ve been working there for years. The mother has another job as well, sewing special orders for an interior designer. The family is from Mexico, don’t speak English; three of the owners of the laundry are Chinese, an older couple and another man, who speak broken English. But they managed fine; everybody was friendly and got along. When the attendant’s mother was there, she and I would pass the time gossiping and laughing in Spanish while I washed and dried and folded my laundry, and she wiped a rag over the nearby machines, or leaned against her mop, both of us working at a leisurely pace.

If I came in early and the three owners were there, the lady owner always offered me, and a few of the other regulars, a soda from the machine. This relationship had developed over time; us regulars knew each other, we were friendly and didn’t cause problems, helped newbies out, and even took on little chores like keeping the carts lined up neatly and the machines’ doors closed, and handling problems, like when a machine overflowed one of us would call the owner and leave a message, others of us would grab the towels the owners left by the sink and clean up the mess. The owners had sometimes pressed me into translating, and the lady had even asked me to help her fold some of her sheets and bedspreads when she took them out of the dryer. “These from China,” she would tell me. All of that was good.

The fourth owner, also Chinese and the wife of the other man, spoke fluent English. She hardly ever came into the business. Where the other owners worked hard and fast and quietly, she would slop around, with a big fake smile on her face like she was on stage, look at me, I’m rich but I’m not above working, and mingling with the common folk. She didn’t talk to anyone, except when she brought her repairman, a Mexican guy she was all flirty with. The repairman preferred talking to anybody but her, usually he’d be making time with me; for this, I’d get the great big fake smile and the evil eye.

Most of the washers at that laundromat are front loaders, with plastic dispenser drawers you pull out; they have three tiny slots that you are supposed to load with your detergent, bleach, and softener before you start the machine. There were signs above the machines that said something like, These Are High Efficiency Machines. Use Only A Quarter Cup of Soap. A lot of the time when I would slide out the dispenser drawer, the dispenser sections would be nasty, gluey and jammed up with mounds of leftover detergent all around the rim of the dispenser drawer and in the slots. That’s because, despite the sign and the little dispensers, some people would start the machine, fill up the dispenser, shake the drawer to make the detergent go down, then pull out the drawer and pour more detergent in there, shake the dispenser to get more soap down in there, again and again, until they got enough detergent in one machine to wash all the clothes in all the Laundromats in San Diego. Totally the wrong thing to do. This information comes from ezine articles.com and explains why.: In a front loader your clothes are picked up by the vanes inside the drum, lifted to the top of the drum, and then dropped into water laying at the bottom of the drum. This collision of clothes and water will dislodge the dirt from the clothing fibers. Later the drum stops turning, the water flows out the bottom of the drum via the pump, taking both water and dirt out to the household drain. Finally the drum is spun at very high speed to remove the final amounts of water, dirt and detergent from the clothes. This front-loading method of cleaning your clothes is both simple and dependable.

If you use regular detergent in your front loader excess suds will be produced by the interaction of the detergent and tumbling water. These unwanted suds will accumulate at the bottom of the wash drum where they will lie on top of the water. Within minutes these suds will take the form of a big fluffy cushion. This cushion hinders clothes from reaching the water. As your clothes fall from the top of the drum to the bottom they hit the suds cushion rather than the water. The result is a very poor wash.

Now: I used to go to that Laundromat two or three, sometimes four times a week at different times of the day or night. When I spoke earlier of regulars who helped out, whom the three owners appreciated and liked, and who interacted with the attendants, of the ones I knew of that washed in the morning when the owners were there, two were Hispanic (one being me), one was a black lady, of those that washed in the afternoon or evening, one was me, one was a white guy. A fair amount of Mexican, black, and white people wash at this place, but most of the clientele are Filipinos, many of them regulars. Whatever time of the day I was there, the Filipino women who were regulars were possessive of the place, and it was clear they didn’t like “other people” in “their” Laundromat. I had had a few ridiculous little run-ins with Filipina women there over “their” carts and “their” machines and “their” counter space, and almost every time I was in there, I’d get looks and attitude. The Filipino regulars mostly kept to themselves, washed and dried and left.

As to who clogged up the dispenser drawers, the ones I’d seen adding all that soap were Filipino women, maybe they weren’t the only ones, but those were the people I observed doing it. Many of the Asian people I saw in there were always doing things like cleaning the counter where they were going to fold their clothes, cleaning their laundry baskets, sometimes even wiping inside the machines or the dryers before they used them. So it didn’t surprise me that they would chuck all that detergent in the machines, because that behavior fit in with their clean-freakiness. Now when the drawers were filled with crud, I would pull them out, rinse them in the sink, and put them back in the machine. I had talked a few times about the messy dispenser drawers to the attendants or their mother, because they would see me cleaning the drawers at the sink, but I never mentioned anything about race, nor did they, attendants or mother, say anything about race, just agreed that people put too much detergent in and it sometimes even broke down the machines. Basically we were talking mess and mechanics. The only reason I have now organized this all in my mind around race is because of something that happened.

About three months ago, I was at the Laundromat, I was finished washing and drying, was folding my clothes; the counters where I was folding my clothes line up against the back of a row of front loaders. The fake smile owner was slopping around the place, fake smiling. A Filipina lady was across from where I was, on the side where the machines were, loading her dirty clothes. I’d seen this lady in there before; she always looked mad and talked loud, mainly in Tagalog. That day, she said, loud and in English, “Dirty Mexicans.” Which naturally got my attention. I kept folding and listened. She was talking to the owner, who happened to be near by. “These Mexicans, why they don’t clean machines. Look how dirty.” The owner came over and stood there a minute, then walked away with something in her hand; it was a dispenser drawer.

I kept folding, and at the same time looking at the woman who had said Dirty Mexicans; she finally looked up, over at me. Now I know she saw me there before she made the remark. She said: “Hola, amiga.” I held her eyes a moment longer, then resumed my folding without answering. She started talking in Tagalog to a man that came over to her, might have been her husband.

Then the owner came back and put the dispenser drawer in the machine. The owner said to the woman, “The Mexicans don’t use the machines right.” And again, I knew she knew I was there before she said what she said. I looked across again, waiting for her to look at me. She finally did, and gave me her big fake-o smile. I kept folding my clothes. I finished folding, while the woman on the other side was still rattling away in Tagalog, gathered my things and left.

The next week I decide to go a Laundromat in my part of town. The parking is terrible. The place looks like a dump. Half the machines don’t seem to work and steal your money, the rest work badly. The change machines don’t dispense change for anything other than dollar bills. The carts’ wheels stick because they are so full of hair and debris. There’s a barber shop that caters mostly to black men next door to the laundry. Men stand outside and smoke, and the smoke blows into the laundromat. Men hanging out at the barber shop come in and sit on the bench for a minute then go back out. Sometimes they walk through the Laundromat as they go from the corner of the mall back to the barber shop. The same people seem to hang out there, every day; I have been going back to that Laundromat week after week after week. But it’s pretty hopeless; that Laundromat is the pits, I know I’m going to have to go elsewhere. I don’t want to go to the other Laundromats I know around here because they are even worse dumps, as I recall them from years ago, though that may have changed. I either have to find another Laundromat somewhere, or go back to the dirty Mexican one.

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